Isla McKetta, MFA, Author at A Geography of Reading

Dividing Identity and Point of View with Ondaatje’s Divisadero

May 25, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

In Divisadero, Michael Ondaatje uses an odd narrative point of view. Though Ondaatje shifts between passages in the first person points of view of Anna and of Lucien Segura and also third person omniscience, the novel can be read as a compilation of Anna’s reminiscences, extrapolations, and imagination.

The first chapter begins in the first person point of view of Anna as she reflects on growing up with her sister Claire and Cooper, a boy they were raised with. There are glimpses of omniscience in Anna’s voice: “[t]here is a broken path in both our memories toward this incident, even now.” What verges on omniscience here is that Anna is speaking for herself and for Claire as though they are still in touch, but so far as the narrative is concerned, Anna and Claire haven’t seen each other since they were sixteen and may never again.

Throughout the book, identity is confused, adopted, and changed and this mirrors the shifting quality of the point of view. When Cooper rescued Anna from the barn, he “called [Anna] ‘Claire.’ So that Claire herself became confused, uncertain for a moment as to who she was.” Anna refers to herself as “this person formerly known as Anna” and Cooper confuses Anna for Claire and later Claire for Anna. This quality of never quite knowing who is narrating made me want to understand how the different narrators fit together.

To add to the strange quality of the point of view, there is one section narrated in first person plural. In this scene, we are looking at pictures of people who have lived in or near Lucien Segura’s house and Ondaatje writes about the second of two photographs “[w]e are much closer to the subject in this picture. Photography has moved in from the middle distance as the century progressed.” Anna is referred to in the third person, as “[t]he woman” and “[t]his person who is barely Anna,” so it feels as though Anna is not the narrator, but Ondaatje is also giving a clue here. This section in with its odd point of view and passages about shifting distance was my key to unlocking the point of view. I started to understand what I had sensed earlier, that Ondaatje had created a world where the reader is seeing things from both inside and outside of Anna, but the narrator is always Anna.

It is easy to understand how Anna could have constructed a first person narrative for Lucien Segura. She is living in his home and she is studying him and his papers. It feels somehow natural for her to fall into his voice and Ondaatje reinforces this scholar-subject interaction in the last section of the novel, Say Your Goodbyes. Here the reader is gently lifted step by step out of Segura’s world by the third person narrator as Segura’s actions are less and less dramatized and more and more reported on as the narrator, who I have assumed is Anna, begins to analyze Segura’s life and his works and his life is wrapped neatly up. The book ends with Anna narrating in the first person.

Entire portions of the novel are told in a third person point of view that Anna could not have the information to relate. She so much as says: “I would never see Coop again.” If Anna is the narrator, only a few things could account for her omniscience about Claire and Cooper. Anna could have gained her power through some supernatural means, or, more likely, Anna has invented narratives for Claire and Cooper using her intimate knowledge of them from before just as she constructed a narrative for Lucien Segura based on his papers and her encounters with Rafael.

In the section titled The Person Formerly Known as Anna, the first-person Anna alludes to her inhabiting of Claire: “[i]n my work I sometimes borrow Claire’s nature as well as her careful focus on the world” and “I feel I can imagine most things about Claire accurately. I know her.” She goes on to say “[b]ut Coop I know only in one distinct way–as the twenty-year-old I fell in love with,” and it is true, Cooper’s narrative of becoming a lonely cardsharp and then being tempted into danger by a woman could easily be extrapolated from the loner lifestyle he led within Anna’s family and the risks he took to be with her. Claire’s rescue of Cooper and the love that develops between them as he calls her Anna seems like something Anna could have invented to assuage her guilt over leaving these two people she loved deeply behind while at the same time ultimately triumphing over Claire because Cooper is still in love with Anna, not Claire. It is as though Anna brought Cooper and Claire together in a mocking atonement for the moment in the barn where Cooper rescued Anna instead of Claire.

The point of view in this book was difficult for me to get a handle on. I sensed that Anna was narrating, but when portions of her life were recounted in the third person, I kept flipping back to see if I had misread the first section. I’m not sure yet that I completely understand whether there was something I missed in the mixing of Claire and Anna. Ondaatje managed to convey Anna’s disembodiment through his complicated construction of point of view and I’m not sure it could have been captured as well in any other way. I enjoyed mulling over the book and reading passages over and over, but at times I was also frustrated by not being to accurately place all of the pieces on my chess board. I couldn’t tell whether the narrator was reliable, because I didn’t know who it was and I kept looking for someone other than Anna to turn up as the third person narrator. That said, I like some aspects of the complexity of the narration.

In my own work, I am still grappling with point of view. At one time I wanted to construct Polska, 1994 from a series of narrators who were all observing Magda so that she would be drawn entirely from the observations of others until the rape when she decides to embody herself. In the long run, I found that I wanted to inhabit her more than that, but I still ache to create a richer world than I can totally create through the eyes of a girl of seventeen.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Divisadero from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Sherman Alexie and Microaggressions in Indian Killer

May 23, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

I have spent the last several days riveted by Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer and it has challenged me every step of the way.

I grew up in Idaho—arguably the whitest state in the nation. Yes, you know it for its white supremacists (who I’m told have moved to Montana, but I really wouldn’t know). My small town once made The New York Times when an Arab student was found “lynched” in the woods (the death was later ruled a suicide). I had an African American friend and a few Asian friends (the university did bring some diversity to town), but the culture was pretty homogenous and my experience with race was limited.

I’ve lived in Seattle for a decade and a half, but despite the greater diversity of communities here, I never got over my inability to talk about race. I try sometimes, but I mostly fumble awkwardly and throw in some words I learned in Sociology. I am not an unworldly person, I have lived abroad and I think managed not to be the ugly American. But when it comes to race at home, I’m still flummoxed, despite good intentions. And here I am still beating around the bush.

A friend has introduced me to the idea of microaggressions, defined by Chester Pierce as “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward people of other races.” Alexie does a fantastic job of presenting these when the narrator muses about how a Native American student’s teacher interacts with him, “If John happened to be a little fragile, well, that was perfectly understandable, considering his people’s history. All that alcoholism and poverty, the lack of God in their lives.” Those two sentences, early in this book, rocked my world. I saw how “well meaning” can be hurtful when we are looking through our stereotypes instead of at people directly.

Indian Killers introduced me to a wide array of Native American experiences. Set in Seattle, the characters are homeless, housed, drunk, and sober. They are mixed race and not and they represent a number of tribes and degrees of identification with race. The Native American characters in the book are in themselves diverse and their experiences with Caucasians are equally diverse. All the characters are round (read universally flawed) and I learned from their strengths and foibles. I learned from their friction points and their biases.

I loved this book. I’m still a failure when it comes to talking naturally about race, but I am learning to open up and at least try to have the conversation and to look at people for who they are without the shortcut of skin color or nationality. Plus Indian Killers is a great mystery and flat out well-written.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Indian Killer from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

James Ellroy and Sexual Violence

May 22, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

Watching L.A. Confidential again last night, I started to reflect on my long history with James Ellroy. I was young when I first started reading him—maybe eleven or twelve—and The Black Dahlia was not my first of his books. When I started with Clandestine or Brown’s Requiem, the noir voice had me, a girl who had grown up on the movie The Big Sleep but never read Raymond Chandler, hooked. The Black Dahlia was the second book of his that I read and as a burgeoning woman, I wanted to be as beautiful and as desired as Betty Short. I was young enough and immortal enough that the extreme violence committed against her didn’t even phase me. Even after reading L.A. Confidential and several other books, I didn’t key into it or how it might be affecting me.

If you know anything about Ellroy, you know that his mother was brutally murdered and that his books, especially those early ones, are places where he is dealing with that trauma. Elizabeth Short’s death was not dissimilar to his mother’s and there is often at least one Bud White in each early James Ellroy novel trying to save the girl—any girl—from harm. I believe that the resulting works show a respect for women, even if it borders on unhealthy worship.

I was still very young and unsettled when I watched the premiere of L.A. Confidential in 1997 at SIFF. I still wanted to be one of the women that the foul-mouthed writer would worship, and I still thought murder, even brutal serial killer style murder, was interesting enough to take Bob Keppel’s class on Ted Bundy.

In the last few years, maybe as I’ve begun to see myself more as a mortal person not merely a sexual object, I’ve started to wonder about the sexual violence against women we expose ourselves to through various media. I used to enjoy Criminal Minds, but now I realize that (despite some smart detectives) the stories are populated with women as victims and the violence is often heinous and sexual. The last few years, the torture rape filled horror movies have ruined for me one of my favorite film genres. The only conversations I can have about The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo are about whether the sexual violence is for titillation and I’m still not convinced it isn’t.

Violence happens. I’m headed to Croatia soon and one of the things I can’t get out of my mind is the rape camps of the Bosnian War and that we can barely talk about it still. Humans are animals and at times that is far too evident. I don’t think we should ignore it, but I also don’t think we should normalize it. At the same time, it can be interesting to learn about those uncontrolled parts of ourselves.

I try not to read about rape (no more Stieg Larsson for me and I’ll skip The Kite Runner, thank you). I did write about rape in Polska, 1994 because I wanted to try to understand it. I’m glad I did, because through writing about Magda’s victimization, I was able to see myself as a whole person (rather than a victim) with power in my actions. My fear is that for many people scenes of sexual violence and torture are becoming sources of excitement rather than cautionary and we are teaching our children that women are victims not people. Even James Ellroy saw women as victim-objects to be saved.

I don’t have any answers, but the long-lasting effects of the victimization of women in media is something I will continue to think about.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of L.A. Confidential from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Shards of Ismet Prcic: Fragmenting the Balkans through Literature

May 19, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

I picked up Shards by Ismet Prcic because we’re traveling to Croatia soon and I often like to explore the literature of a country before arriving—something about getting to know the soul of a place and a people through art. The book is a fantastically well-written story of a man who grew up during and escaped (kind of) the Bosnian War and I could say all kinds of complimentary things about its construction and the characters and language. But what I want to talk about today is how an outsider views a culture.

When making my reading list for this upcoming trip, I wanted to read contemporary works that were available in English. In listening to Benjamin Moser’s “That Other Word” interview, I realized how selective the process is that leads to works being translated into English. Prcic wrote Shards in English, but Saša Stanišić wrote How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone in German and Dubravka Ugrešić wrote The Ministry of Pain in Croatian. I mention these three in particular, because these are the books that came to hand in my search (though I had already read The Ministry of Pain).

These books have in common that they all deal with the effects of the Balkan War on their characters, and I came to wonder, are there contemporary Balkan books that don’t? I am thinking about definition a lot lately and the roles we put on ourselves and the roles others put on us. I could understand if every contemporary writer in any way associated with the region only wrote about the war—war has a huge and lasting impact—but I suspect that there are writers who deal more peripherally with the war (if at all) and I am interested to know if their work is being translated. I am curious about the filters that are being applied by translators and agents and editors and publishing houses to the way I see the Balkans. How horrible it would be if writers from the former Yugoslavia were given the impression that the world is only interested in their work if it is about the Balkan War. How limiting for their potential audience.

Perhaps I’m wondering how much daily life in the tourist areas of Dubrovnik is affected by the war or I am curious about the lives of our soon-to-be landlords. Perhaps I feel a little guilty that I have gone from seeing Plitvice as the place my grandmother most loved to seeing it as the place where the first shot of the war was fired. Perhaps I am thinking about my own writing and the lack of control I feel in a world where the success of a writer is still determined by so many external actors (and I don’t mean readers). In learning more about Croatia and its neighbors, I have read some very good books, including Shards, but I keep feeling like I’m only able to experience through these books one aspect of a rich group of cultures. I guess that’s what the plane ticket is for…

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Shards from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

The Poetic Narrative of Pablo Neruda’s Memoirs

May 18, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

Pablo Neruda had a fascinating life and met all sorts of interesting people from Che Guevara to Federico García Lorca. But in reading his Memoirs, I felt like he was recounting all of these stories to me as opposed to letting me relive them with him. Although Neruda uses some dialogue, he rarely ventures into full-blown scene. The closest he gets are little vignettes like:

“A few hours later I was buying some apples in a fruit store when a horse-drawn carriage halted at the door. A tall, ungainly character dressed in black got out of it. He, too, was going to buy apples. On his shoulder he carried an all-green parrot, which immediately flew over to me and perched on my head without even looking where it was going.”

This section proceeds for three more paragraphs in ten lines as Neruda inquires about the man’s identity. The last paragraph is, “I didn’t know him and I never saw him again. But I accompanied him into the street with due respect, silently opened the carriage door for him and his basket of fruit to get in, and solemnly placed the bird and the sword in his hands.” It is interesting for certain, but it seems as though Neruda is ascribing meaning to the interaction that the reader does not necessarily have access to.

Neruda utilizes a lot of description in his summary and his language is quite poetic, but it is always presented to the reader rather than experienced. There are passages of pure narration that are quite pleasant, “I am writing in Isla Negra, on the coast, near Valparaíso. The powerful winds that whipped the shore have just blown themselves out. The ocean—rather than my watching it from my window, it watches me with a thousand eyes of foam…” At the end of many chapters he includes passages of commentary so descriptive and without chronology or incident that it may be a poem and seem better understood by the soul than the mind: “…How many works of art…There’s not enough room in the world for them anymore…They have to hang outside the rooms…How many books…”

The effect is that the reader is completely at Neruda’s mercy. When something historical or salient emerges, I expect scene and get summary. When he is musing on mundane details, Neruda comes closer to scene than anywhere else in the narrative. It is difficult to engage in a normal fashion with the book for this reason. But he did lead a fascinating life.

I find I am increasingly drawn to books with strong narrators, like Pynchon, Kundera, and Duras, who can weave a spell for me and let me surrender to the narrative. What this book shows me is that a strong narrator is not enough. The narrator has to let me into the world, to give me the keys as it were, otherwise I feel like I am watching Last Year at Marienbad—interesting, but I don’t necessarily understand it enough to engage with it. Most of Neruda’s writing is intelligible, but the lack of sensory detail in the vignettes kept me separate from the narrative. I want to be careful of this in my own work. I am learning it is alright to tend towards summary rather than scene, but if I do, then I have to be very careful about engaging the reader. Otherwise it becomes an oration, not a narration. Readers often pick up a memoir because of who wrote it. Fiction writers need to first build trust with a reader before the reader will follow them.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Memoirs from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.